Why longer isnt always better.

I know I dont post often, I am sorry. I am not in the lifestyle of ending my adventures in the electronic wilderness with a post about it. I prefer to collect my thoughts and proceed with the next phase of progress. Which comes to mind, the RM4100 is not forgotten! It will be finish after I tie up some loose ends!

I have been fighting with my Web DT366 quite a bit, I enjoy this little fucker. Granted it has some handicaps when it comes to the USB, and inability to boot from onboard Compact Flash (herein referred to as CF) with the internal connector. This is what I have been up to

The one major crippling issue of the WebDT was its USB 1.1 to load an OS from, and the 512MB FlashROM Board. The USB 1.1 is totally useless to run a live OS distro, no matter how small it may be. Now I have tried and tried some more, using every tech trick inside my e-Hat to get a way t hook another drive to this bus so we can use a more enhanced OS. Im no looking for OSX or Vista, but something thats usable in general, and not so stripped down it barely does the task you want it to do, say... scan for wifi, map networks, control head for your home automation and A/V gear. This lil' buggar has alot of potential, but the lack of storage is a major Achelie's heel.

In essence this is a regular IDE bus, 44 pin header. But here is the catch, its half hight We cant plug into it with a regular connector, and I havent found one that could fit so far. Since my last post about the Web DT I have been corresponding with Molex, whom makes similar connectors. I thought I finally kicked the WebDT int the nuts and made it my subservient anime school-girl bitch. Molex was QUITE helpful for sending me countless samples oh pin headers to line up and get mated into this motherboard.

It turns out the motherboard uses a standard 44 pin ~ 2mm spacing on the PCB itself. This is a throughhole component, all the connectors I have are SMD, assuming the board was in fact - SMD - and here I am like a schmuck looking at this through-hole header. Sick of waiting, and with the essence of a hacker, I make due with what I have.

*I DO NOT RECOMMEND DOING THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE VERY GOOD SOLDERING SKILLS!! ~ YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!*

[PICS Will be added later]

I attempted to sand a 44 pin IDE Cable for laptops to be half height to fit over the connector. This failed because most of the pins did not make proper connection. This took a week of trial an error before it took a total nosedive into the utter end of total-fail! I cut the remaining connector off, which wasnt much by the time I was done by the end of the mod, to be left with a cable that had one working crimped 44 pin IDE end, and a nice length of ribbon cable.

I then spliced each wire, and then tinned them, prepping them to be soldered directly to the motherboard in the through-hole pads. Thing here is, however, there was already a connector in place. What I had done was *gently but firmly* clamp the board in place, then proceed to work. Using a typical 35W iron with decent tinned tip, I held it on the pad holding the pin, and with a pair tweezers (or other fine tipped tool for grabbing small tings) pulled the pin out. I pain painstakingly removed all 44 pins, then pulled the plastic layering off. No glue, it just popped right off with no issues. I cleaned up the remnant of solder that were in the through-holes with some cheap desolder braid. It was surprisingly easy! I didnt have a single issue with any of the through-hols at all. It was just very tedious and pain staking in my back and neck

The board is clearly marked Pin 1,2, 43, and 44 for reference, No Guesswork here! Always a plus! I prepped the IDE cable I destroyed, the header was gone from excessive sanding in shy hope of getting it to natively fit with the now missing connector. I pulled he wires apart a wee bit, spliced, and GENTLY pre-tinned them with solder. Sorry, no amazing pics there. Nothing too exciting to see, I got all the pins soldered in place as neatly as possible [Pics to come, next time I pull the DT apart].

Now here is the important part! The Web DT366 uses a through-hole 2mm pin header! It does NOT use a SMD or multilayer pin header. You can easily salvage or buy (or claim free sample) proper pin headers, and solder it in place, that is if you dont want to take the pain-mistaking long amount of back breaking work to get the IDE cable directly soldered in. I will order some proper headers from molex as soon as I can to mod my other DTs.

Now with any IDE cable or header mods done you will need mods done to the WebDT. This is one of many options. When I get the others completed (for friends) I will post results.

Now that we have a working IDE interface its time to get an OS installed. As previously stated in earlier posts, the WebDT can boot from USB Optical Drives, or USB Multboot. Now I have had more luck with the optical drives, but if you want to do the USB Multiboot method, by all means feel free to try. If you come into a 0x0000007b Blue Screen of Death Error, you have issues with the IDE Controller Drivers. Take nLite out for a date ad perhaps a nice movie and you will get lucky. Works for me. Still being you are installing whatever OS from USB 1.1, my case being XP Pro SP2 Corp', its going to take some time, so be patient. Of course there are some MAJOR optimizations to me made in the OS, and where to get proper OS drivers, but thats for another post.

Here are some critical findings about the IDE so far:

• Compact Flash (mine is 133x and says it supports IDE modes) only does PIO mode, which is VERY SLOW! It is comparable in speed to the onboard 512MB IDE FlashROM Board. Definitely not the fastest thing to be running an OS from,
  

• The IDE bus supplies a 3.3V line, with very low amperage. I have not measured (the amperage) it, but it gets into my next point.

• If you choose to use a Microdrive, although 44 pin to CF adapters exist, the WebDT IDE bus cant push out enough amperage to power the drive. It will detect, but encounter errors or IRQ conflicts (OS Dependant) during install. I am working on a fix for this, so you better brush up on your soldering skills!

• 1.8" IDE derives, or also known as 'iPod Hard Drives' or 'ZIF Hard Drives will give the same issue as microdrives, however...!
  

• The typical IDE chain runs at 5V, the 1.8" ZIF Drive runs at 3.3V. I had modified the adapter board replacing the onboard surface mount regulator with a bare wire (the small 4 pin black rectngle ting at the top of the board) allowing the WebDT 3.3V Rail to power the drive... again there is no way to get enough amperage to the HDD, and your OS will return an error. There is a fix for this that I will attempt. That is to snip the +V rail of the IDE pin on the male header of the drive adapter, and solder a wire to a known +5V source, perhaps some unused USB Bus ports un he WebDT 366 Dock. USB will give 5V at 500mA. More than enough to power the 1.8" HDD. The 5V though, not good... I will have to wire the 5V from USB into the onboard regulator, but disconnect the +V pin on the adapter header so we arent crossing the USB +5V line into the IDE +3.3V Line. Sounds hard, but it shouldnt be. Ill cut the physical pin on the header, remove it completely, then solder in the +5V needed that will be plugged into a very and utterly useless USB header on the bottom dock connection. As long as the new +5V line doesnt attach to the onboard IDE 3.3V rail, all will be well.
  

So far I have full non-nlite XP running from an 8GB x133 CF card with minimal tweaks.No Themes, running in classic mode, turned off Indexing, turned off Restore points. adjusted the Pagefile a bit, turns off all animations and graphical embellishments; although I did keep in Common tasks. Graphics, sound, touchpanel work, need to get my PCMCIA wifi card working,but thats the last on the list. I need to go and do tons of service patch updates and install my USB wifi cards, WiSpy, and other little doo-dats.... K-Melion, PUTTY, Kismet, inSSIDer, Channelizer, VLC, Winamp 2.7x, WinRar, nMap, audacity, Scanner Recorder... just to name a few.

I am not taking this Install too serious as I will be running nLite across this for a custom install in general, and I need to get better Penmount support, and the Button Agent working. Button Agent isnt exactly open and downloadable, so I need to get a copy...somewhere. Maybe a decent On Sceen Keyboard would cool, but I cant find any that dont blow. I have a bluetooth keyboard, perhaps, or maybe interface my Erickson Chat board into the unused serial port on the Motherbard... Or even a mini USB, I have a few of those. Would be nice to make a Chorded Keyboard wit Flexstrip sensor interface, but not I am going beyond the topic of this post.

Ill try and post more about my hobbies and general works more often, I promise.